“The long-term engagement and on-going results of these three case studies makes it possible to think that architecture indeed can be a catalyst for structural change. The first reaction to the financial crisis in 2008 was marked by the oversaturation of pop-up or bottom-up projects, especially in the public space and made by different agents, not always architects. Blogs, social networks, and specialized websites were focused on spreading what rapidly became a new trend ‒ the concept of tactical urbanism. Without money and after the struggles and upheavals they had been through, many architects started working together in a collective way, reusing materials to transform the streets into public spaces or to create spaces for exchange and leisure. The use of technology and social networks to create a diffuse territory between the physical and the digital was studied under the concept of sentient city and rapidly appropriated by the neoliberal market with the notion of smart cities. The idea of living in “a city that can remember, correlate, and anticipate," is too strong to be dismissed, and urban design in recent years has been based on this driving force. It seems that a wave of techno-optimism has been at the foundations of every single independent project built on this context and a significant amount of proposals have been based on the use of the tools instead of trying to change the basis of the problem. Crowdfunding, 3D printing, and digital fabrication can be found at the core of the so-called most innovative proposals, but these kinds of proposals have not always been the most successful in transforming and enriching the daily life of citizens.”
